"Tenants continue to have an urban preference as they look to appease a youthful workforce," the CBRE report said.
Still, the suburban office market, with 58.8 million square feet of space, is more than three times larger than Detroit's 16.3 million square feet.
But the city has a long way to go to make up for decades of disinvestment and job losses.
Detroit had 23,465 business establishments in 1972, according to the first economic census taken after the devastating 1967 riots. By 2007, the last census figures available, the number had fallen by two-thirds to 7,817.
The city has lost 25 percent of its population just in the past decade. About 701,000 people live in Detroit, down from its peak of 1.8 million in 1950.
And although Hudson Webber says there are more than 10,000 new workers in downtown Detroit than there were in 2010, the city as a whole has added only about 3,000 new jobs in that time period, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some suburban officials say they have been successful in finding new tenants for buildings vacated by businesses moving into downtown Detroit.
Farmington Hills City Manager Steve Brock said when Compuware Corp. decamped from there to Detroit in 2003, a major law firm and affiliated companies soon took over the company's space.
Patterson said a more economically vibrant Detroit would turn around negative perceptions of the entire metro Detroit region and help him bring more businesses to Oakland County.
Until we hear about more companies moving into Detroit from out of state instead of just moving there from the suburbs, it's tough to get too excited. Just playing the shell game.
I don't see it as a "zero-sum game" at all. When businesses move back into Detroit from the suburbs, that generates a lot of goodwill, excitement, and buzz about the NAME "Detroit". When you hear companies from out-of-state talking about moving, they don't ever read about or think, "Gee, we hear a lot of good things about Troy, Michigan!" or "Let's move to Warren!". No, they say "Detroit". I work for a company that is on track to hire over 50 people this year; these are NEW jobs in Detroit. My company decided to launch IN DETROIT because of the positive buzz and excitement around this burgeoning business district. They moved here from Texas simply because Detroit is seen as a vibrant, upcoming, cool, and exciting place to do business. I know of quite a few businesses that are moving here from out of state, and it's because of large companies that move INTO the city and generate positive buzz and PR from the suburbs. It's pretty simple: Detroit is exciting and interesting. The suburbs are not.